-- The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy
Website --The subject of determinism and freedom has
certainly been bound up with moral philosophy, among other things, and
it continues to be. It is bound up with reasoning about what you ought
to do, and holding people morally responsible for their actions, and
the principle that someone can be judged only for doing or not doing
what in fact he could do -- 'ought' implies 'can'. Does this commit you
to believing in a freedom that you cannot have if determism is true? Or
should we give up that seemingly strong or
even indubitable principle? John Fischer, who also has another paper on this website,
is a veteran of these philosophical contests, and teaches at the
University of California at Riverside .

I. Introduction

Much has been written recently about free will and moral
responsibility. In this paper I will focus on the relationship
between free will, on the one hand, and various notions that fall under
the rubric of “morality,” broadly construed, on the other: deliberation
and practical reasoning, moral responsibility, and ethical notions such
as “ought,” “right,” “wrong,” “good,” and “bad.” I shall begin by
laying out a natural understanding of freedom of the will. Next I
develop some challenges to the common-sense view that we have this sort
of freedom. I will go on to explore the implications of this
challenge for deliberation, moral responsibility, and the central
ethical notions.

II. Free Will and the Challenge
from Causal Determinism

We naturally think of ourselves—“normal” adult human beings—as
“free.” That is, we take it that we have a certain distinctive
sort of control. I shall use “free will” (or “freedom of
the will”) as an umbrella term to refer to the sort of freedom or
control we presuppose that we human beings possess, and that is
connected in important ways to ascriptions of moral responsibility.
As I shall be employing the term, “free will” need not entail
that we have a special faculty of the will, but only that we have a
certain kind of freedom or control. But what is this freedom?

It is extremely natural and plausible to think that the typical adult
human being has freedom in the sense that we often (although perhaps
not
always) have the freedom to choose or refrain from choosing a
particular
course of action (where “course of action” can refer to an omission as
well as an action, narrowly construed), and to undertake or refrain
from undertaking this course of action. That is, we take it that
we often (although perhaps not invariably) have “alternative
possibilities”: although we actually choose and undertake a particular
course of action, we
had it in our power (or “could have”) chosen and undertaken a
different course of action. Of course, we recognize that
sometimes we
are “coerced” or “compelled” to choose or act as
we do; and some individuals never have control over their choices and
actions
(because of significant mental illness, brain damage, and so
forth). But we assume that the typical adult human being at least
sometimes has more than one available path. That is, we assume,
in Borges’ phrase, that the future is a garden of forking paths.

But there are various skeptical worries or challenges to the intuitive
notion that we have free will in the sense that involves alternative
possibilities. One of the most important such challenges comes
from the doctrine of causal determinism. Causal determinism is
the thesis that every event (and thus every choice and bit of behavior)
is deterministically caused by some event in the past; thus, every
choice and bit of behavior is the result of a casual chain, each link
in which is deterministically caused by some prior link (until one gets
to the beginning, if there is a beginning). More specifically,
one can say that causal determinism is the doctrine that a
complete statement of the laws of nature and a complete description of
the
temporally nonrelational or “genuine” facts about the world at
some time T entail every truth about the world after T. That is,
if
causal determinism is true, then the past and the natural laws entail a
unique
present and future path for the world. Note further that if
someone
had available to her the description of the past and the statement of
the
laws, she could with certainty state what happens in the present and
what
will happen in the future. But it does not follow from the truth
of
the metaphysical doctrine of causal determinism that anyone actually
has access
to the relevant truths about the universe or its laws.

I contend that no human being currently knows whether or not the
doctrine of causal determinism obtains. Certain physicists
believe that the study of physical phenomena at the micro-level renders
it very plausible that
causal determinism is false (and thus that “indeterminism” is
true.) Note, again, that indeterminism is a metaphysical, rather
than
an epistemic doctrine; that is, causal indeterminism posits
indeterminacies in nature, not just incompleteness in our understanding
of nature. But
other physicists (and philosophers) cling to the view that causal
determinism is true, and that what appear currently to be genuine
metaphysical indeterminacies reflect mere inadequacies in our knowledge
of the world.

Since we cannot be certain at this point that causal determinism is
false, it is perhaps worthwhile to think about what would follow, if it
turned out that causal determinism is true. It is troubling that
there is a very potent argument, employing ingredients from common
sense, which appears to show that if causal determinism indeed turned
out to be true, then no human being would have free will in the sense
that involves alternative possibilities. The argument appears to
show that the future is not a garden of forking
paths, on the assumption of causal determinism. The following is
an
informal and intuitive presentation of the argument.

Suppose I make some ordinary choice C at time T2. If causal
determinism is true, then the total state of the universe at T1
together with the laws of nature entail that I make C at T2.
Thus, it was a necessary condition of my making a different choice at
T2 that either the state of the universe at T1 have been different from
what it actually was, or some proposition that expressed a natural law
would not have expressed a natural law. But, intuitively, I
cannot—do not have it in my power—at any time
so to behave that the past would have been different from the way it
actually
was. And, similarly, I cannot at any time determine which
propositions
express the natural laws. Intuitively, the past and the natural
laws
are “fixed” and not “up to me.” It seems to
follow from the above ingredients that I could not have chosen
otherwise
than C at T2, if causal determinism turned out to be true.

Here is a slightly different way of presenting basically the same
argument. As I suggested above, intuitively the past and the
laws of nature are fixed and out of my control. The future is a
garden of forking paths:
the paths into the future extend from a given past, holding the laws of
nature
fixed. So, one might say that my freedom is the freedom to extend
the
actual (or given) past, holding fixed the laws of nature. Assume,
again,
the truth of causal determinism, and that I make choice C at T2.
It
follows from the assumption of causal determinism that the state of the
world
at T1 together with the laws of nature entail that I make choice C at
T2.
So in all possible worlds with the same laws as the actual world in
which
the past is just as it actually is, I make choice C at T2, Thus,
it
is logically impossible that my making some other choice C* at T2 be an
extension
of the given past, holding fixed the natural laws. It is evident,
then,
that if causal determinism is true, I cannot make any other choice than
the
one I actually make.

The above argument, suitably regimented and refined, appears to be
generalizable to show that if it turns out that causal determinism is
true, then no human being has the sort of free will that involves
alternative possibilities—freedom to choose or do otherwise, or the
power to select one path the world will take, from among various paths
that are “genuinely” or “really” open. This argument for
“incompatibilism”—the incompatibility of causal determinism and (in
this instance) the sort of free will that involves alternative
possibilities—has been the focal point of much discussion.
Although the argument is controversial, here I shall not explore the
ways in which it can be resisted. Rather, I shall assume that
the argument is sound and explore the implications of this
assumption. As I proceed in this paper, I shall focus on the
question of what would follow, in terms of “morality,” broadly
construed, if we in fact lack the sort of free will that involves
alternative possibilities. Also, I shall consider whether there
are features of causal determinism which would threaten morality, apart
from its ruling out free will (in the sense that involves alternative
possibilities).

III. Deliberation and Practical
Reasoning

III.1. Taylor and van Inwagen. One of the most central aspects of
human “persons” is that we can engage in significant deliberation and
practical reasoning. In deliberating, we consider and weigh
reasons for (and against) various courses of action. We seek to
“figure out what is best to do,” and to act in accordance with this
sort of judgment about what is best, all-things-considered. We of
course are fallible in our judgments, and certainly we sometimes fail
to act in accordance with our judgment about what is best to do,
all-things-considered. But in any case the process of
deliberation (or practical reasoning) involves identifying and weighing
reasons with an eye to figuring out what we have sufficient reason to
do.

Some philosophers have argued that it is a conceptual truth that I
cannot engage in deliberation, if I do not believe that I have free
will, in the sense that involves alternative possibilities. After
pointing out that I can deliberate only about my own behavior (and not
the behavior of another), that I can deliberate only about future
things (rather than present or past things), and that I cannot
deliberate about what I already know that I am going to do, Richard
Taylor adds, “And, finally, I cannot deliberate about what to do, even
though I may not know what I am going to do, unless I believe that it
is up to me what I am going to do.” He goes on to argue that the
relevant notion of “up to me” is incompatible with causal determinism;
on this notion, an act’s being “up
to me” implies that it up to me whether or not I do it.

I am not convinced by Taylor that I would not or could not engage in
deliberation, if I believed that causal determinism were true and thus
that I have it in my power only to choose to do (and to do) what I
actually choose to do (and do). As long as I do not know what I
will in fact choose, it seems
that there is a perfectly reasonable point to deliberation; after all,
I
still need to figure out what I have sufficient reason to do and to
seek to
act in accordance with this judgment. This purpose of
deliberation would
not disappear, in a world in which I knew that it is not “up to me”
(in the sense that involves alternative possibilities in which the
actual
past and natural laws are held fixed) what I will choose. Note
that
it may still be true, even in a causally deterministic world, that in a
particular
context I would choose a course of action if and only if I were to
judge
it best. Further, it does not follow simply from causal determinism
that
there is some special sort of obstacle to my choosing a particular
course of action; causal determinism does not entail that I have some
kind of phobia or compulsion that would rule out my choosing a certain
sort of action. And if one insists that it is a conceptual
truth that my process of weighing reasons would not count as
“deliberation,” then so be it: call it “deliberation*” or simply
“figuring out what it would be best to do,” and there can be a clear
point to such activities
even in a world in which I know that I have only one path that is
genuinely
available into the future.

Peter van Inwagen holds a view which is similar to, but slightly
different from, Taylor’s. On van Inwagen’s account, an agent who
believes that he does not have free will (in the sense of alternative
possibilities) can deliberate, but in so doing he would be
contradicting himself. Van Inwagen says, “In my view, if someone
deliberates about whether to do A or to do B, it follows that his
behavior manifests a belief that it
is possible for him to do A—that he can do A, that he has it within his
power to do A—and that it is possible for him to do B.” Thus, an
individual who sincerely believes that he lacks free will (understood
as above) would be contradicting himself in deliberating—he would
be holding an inconsistent set of beliefs. Whereas this is not
impossible, it is certainly undesirable; for example, holding
inconsistent beliefs guarantees that at least one of one’s beliefs is
false.

But I am not convinced that van Inwagen is correct to say that
deliberation manifests the belief in free will (understood as
above). He says:

Anyone who doubts that this is indeed the case may find it instructive
to imagine that he is in a room with two doors and that he believes one
of
the doors to be unlocked and the other to be locked and impassable,
though he has no idea which is which; let him then attempt to imagine
himself deliberating about which door to leave by.

I agree that it would be odd to think that I could deliberate about
which door actually (or “successfully”) to open. But surely in
such a case I could deliberate about which door to choose to
open. That is, I could weigh reasons and come to a judgment about
which door it would be best to seek to open, and I could form an
intention—choose—to act in accordance with my judgment. There is
not the same intuitive oddness about saying that I could deliberate
about which door to choose to push against that there is to saying that
I could deliberate about which door “to leave by.” It is important to
note that van Inwagen does
not purport to be offering an argument for the contention that anyone
who
deliberates must believe that he has alternative possibilities, apart
from
his invocation of the example of the alleged oddness of deliberating
about
which door to leave by.

But van Inwagen may reply that the apparent lack of oddness in
supposing that I could deliberate about which door (say) to
choose to open stems precisely from the fact that I can suppose that I
am able either to choose to open door A or choose to open door B.
I am not so sure, however, that this is the explanation of the
asymmetry in our intuitions between deliberating about which door to
open and deliberating about which door to choose to
open. Suppose I do in fact choose to open door A. Now if
causal
determinism is true and the argument for the incompatibility of causal
determinism
and free will (understood as involving alternative possibilities) is
sound,
then it turns out that, unbeknownst to me, just prior to my choice I
did
not have it in my power to choose to open door B. Further, it
seems
to me that I could know that causal determinism is true and that the
incompatibilist’s argument is sound, and thus that whichever choice I
make is the only one
I actually can make. This knowledge does not eliminate the point
of
deliberation (the need to figure out which door it would be best to
choose
to open); and I do not have any hesitation in supposing that,
even
with the knowledge that whatever door I choose will be the only door I
in
fact can choose to open, I can deliberate about which door to choose to
open.
Thus I do not believe that the asymmetry in our intuitions between
deliberating
about which door to open and deliberating about which door to choose to
open
stems from an asymmetry in our beliefs about alternative possibilities.

In a causally deterministic world (and given the incompatibilistic
argument), every choice and action would be such that, if I make it (or
perform it), I could not have made another choice (or performed another
action.) But it seems to me that there could still be a perfectly
reasonable point to deliberation, and that I need not contradict myself
in accepting the truth of causal determinism, the soundness of the
argument for incompatibilism, but nevertheless deliberating. All
that is required is that I have an interest in figuring out what I have
sufficient reason to choose, and that
I do not know which course of action I will in fact choose to take (and
take).
Further, van Inwagen has not produced an example in which it is obvious
that
this yields an odd result.

III.2 Searle. John Searle has argued for a point related to the
claims of Taylor and van Inwagen, but it is slightly different.
Searle’s contention is that there would be no point to practical
reasoning or deliberation, if I knew that causal determinism were
true. Searle says:

The gap can be given two equivalent descriptions, one forward-looking,
one backward. Forward: the gap is that feature of our conscious
decision making and acting where we sense alternative future decisions
and actions as causally open to us. Backward: the gap is that
feature of conscious decision making and acting whereby the reasons
preceding the decisions and the actions are not experienced by the
agent as setting causally sufficient conditions for the decisions and
actions. As far as our conscious experiences are concerned, the
gap occurs when the beliefs, desires, and other reasons are not
experienced as causally sufficient conditions for a decision (the
formation of a prior intention…)

Searle goes on to state:

I am advancing three theses here.
1. We have experiences of the gap of the sort I have
described.
2. We have to presuppose the gap. We have to
presuppose that the psychological antecedents of many of our decisions
and actions do not set causally sufficient conditions for those
decisions and actions.
3. In normal conscious life one cannot avoid choosing and
deciding.
Here is the argument for 2 and 3: If I really thought that the beliefs
and desires were sufficient to cause the action then I could just sit
back and watch the action unfold in the same way as I do when I sit
back and watch the action unfold on a movie screen. But I cannot
do that when I am engaging in rational decision making and
acting. I have to presuppose that the antecedent set of
psychological conditions was not causally sufficient.
Furthermore, here is an additional argument for point 3: even if I
became convinced of the falsity of the thesis of the gap, all the same
I would still have to engage in actions and thus exercise my own
freedom no matter what…

For example, there is a kind of practical inconsistency in maintaining
the following two theses:
1. I am now trying to make up my mind whom to vote for in
the next election.
2. I take the existing psychological causes operating on
me right now to be causally sufficient to determine whom I am going to
vote for.

The inconsistency comes out in the fact that if I really believe 2,
then there seems no point in making the effort involved in 1. The
situation would be like taking a pill that I am sure will cure my
headache by itself, and then trying to add some further psychological
effort to the effects of the pill. If I really believe the pill
is enough, then the rational thing to do is to sit back and let it take
effect.

In discussing Searle’s view, I would first point out that when Searle
first introduces the notion of a “gap,” it is a point about our
experiences. Recall that he says, for instance, “the gap is
that feature of our conscious decision making and acting where we sense
alternative future decisions and actions as causally open to us.”
But he
goes on to say, “We have to presuppose the gap. We have to
presuppose that the psychological antecedents of many of our decisions
and actions
do not set causally sufficient conditions for those decisions and
actions.” If the second sentence of the latter quotation is
intended as exegetical, then “the gap” is now thought to be not so much
a feature of
our phenomenology, but of the objective relationship between our mental
states. This is somewhat confusing. From now on, I will
take “the gap thesis” to be the claim that both our experience and the
objective reality of the relationship between our mental states is
indeterministic.

I believe that Searle’s view is incorrect. Note that Leibniz
describes what is essentially this view as the “Lazy Sophism”:

This … demolishes… what the ancients [the Stoics, perhaps following
Cicero] called the ‘Lazy Sophism,’ which ended in
a decision to do nothing: for (people would say) if what I ask is to
happen it will happen even though I should do nothing; and if it is not
to happen it will never happen, no matter what trouble I take to
achieve it… But the answer is quite ready: the effect being
certain, the cause that
shall produce it is certain also; and if the effect comes about it will
be by virtue of a proportionate cause. Thus your laziness
perchance
will bring it about that you will obtain naught of what you desire, and
that you will fall into those misfortunes which you would by acting
with
care have avoided. We see, therefore, that the connexion of
causes
with effects, far from causing an unendurable fatality, provides rather
a means of obviating it.

It seems to me that Searle’s view about deliberation falls prey
to the same objections as the views of Taylor and van Inwagen. I
believe that there would be a clear point to deliberation and practical
reasoning, even if I were to reject the gap: I would still have an
interest in—and deeply care about—figuring out what I have reason to
do, and seeking to act accordingly. Even if the gap thesis
is false, and antecedent psychological states are causally sufficient
for my decision, and I know this, it does not follow that I know what
decision I will make and what action I will perform. Hence,
insofar as I care about acting in accordance with what I have
all-things-considered reason to do, there is a clear point to engaging
in deliberation.

Recall that Searle says that there is a practical inconsistency in
maintaining the following:

1. I am now trying to make up my mind whom to vote for in
the next election.
2. I take the existing psychological causes operating on
me right now to be causally sufficient to determine whom I am going to
vote for.

He says holding these two theses would be like “taking a pill that I am
sure will cure my headache by itself, and then trying to add some
further psychological effort to the effects of the pill.” But in
Searle’s analogy you know that the pill will cure your headache;
in contrast, I am not assumed to know whom I will vote for in the next
election. If I did know whom I would vote for, I agree that the
point of making up my mind would appear to vanish.

Suppose I know that my decision about the next election is causally
determined by my current configuration of mental states (desires,
beliefs, and so forth). Still, I can also know that my decision
will depend on my practical reasoning in the following sense: if I were
to judge it best, all-things-considered, to vote for Candidate A,
I would vote for Candidate A; but if were to to judge it best,
all-things-considered, to vote for Candidate B, I would vote for
Candidate B. Further, I can know that nothing distorts or impairs
my practical reasoning—my ability to recognize the reasons there are,
and to weigh them with an eye to making an all-things-considered
judgment as to what is best. That is, nothing in the doctrine of
causal determinism entails that the counterfactuals (that specify the
relevant sort of dependency) are false, and nothing in this doctrine
entails that I have any special sort of impairment of my capacity to
engage in practical reasoning—certain phobias, compulsions, mental
illnesses, and so forth. And, finally, nothing in the
doctrine of causal determinism entails that I do not care about
choosing and acting in accordance with my judgment about what is best
to do. So there is a clear point to deliberation, even if I
believe that antecedent mental states are causally sufficient for my
decision.

Imagine, to make the point dramatically, that there are two doors in
front of you, and you must choose which door to open. You know
that behind door 1 is a million dollars, and behind door 2 is a den of
rattlesnakes. Imagine, further, that you know that causal
determinism is true, that causal determinism rules out alternative
possibilities, and that causal determinism in itself does not entail
that one has any physical paralysis or impairment of the human capacity
for practical reasoning (no intense phobias, compulsions, paranoid
schizophrenia, and so forth). Would Searle really not
deliberate? What would he do—flip a coin, act arbitrarily, or
what? Would he simply “sit back and watch the action
unfold?” It would seem perfectly reasonable (at the very least)
to take into consideration what is behind the doors, and to choose and
act accordingly. Having collected the million dollars, you might
pause to reflect that it turns out that that was the only thing you
could have done (as long as this thought would not unduly delay the
celebration!).

Searle admits that it is conceivable that our experience of
indeterminism does not map onto the reality of the brain (and that the
neuro-biological events are causally deterministic); but he argues
against this as follows:

This result, however, is intellectually very unsatisfying, because, in
a word, it is a modified form of epiphenomenalism. It says that
the psychological processes of rational decision making do not really
matter. The entire system is deterministic at the bottom level,
and the idea that the top level has an element of freedom is simply a
systematic illusion. …The thesis is epiphenomenalistic in this
respect: there is a feature of our conscious lives, rational decision
making and trying to carry out the decision, where we experience the
gap and we experience the processes as making a causal difference to
our behavior, but they do not in fact make any difference. The
bodily movements were going to be exactly the same regardless of how
these processes occurred.
Maybe that is how it will turn out, but if so, the hypothesis seems to
me to run against everything we know about evolution. It would
have the consequence that the incredibly elaborate, complex, sensitive,
and—above all—biologically expensive system of human and animal
conscious rational decision making would actually make no difference
whatever to the life and survival of the organisms.
Epiphenomenalism is a possible thesis, but it is absolutely incredible,
and if we seriously accepted it, it would make a change in our
worldview, that is, in our conception of our relations to the
world, more radical than any previous change, including the
Copernican Revolution, Einsteinian relativity theory, and quantum
mechanics.
Why would [the hypothesis under consideration] render consciousness any
more epiphenomenal than any other higher-level feature of a physical
system? After all, the solidity of the piston in the car engine
is entirely explained by the behavior of the molecules but that does
not render solidity epiphenomenal. The difference is this: the
essential characteristics of solidity matter to the performance of the
engine, but the essential characteristic of conscious decision making,
the experience of the gap, would not matter in the least to the
performance of the agent. The bodily movements would have been
the same, regardless of the experiences of the gap.

I have argued above that we do not need to presuppose a “gap” of the
sort to which Searle is referring in order to engage in practical
reasoning. I have suggested that practical reasoning may require
an “epistemic gap”—it may be necessary that we not know exactly what we
will choose and do, in order for there to be a point to practical
reasoning (and deliberation). Searle’s gap then is not an
“essential characteristic of conscious decision making.” And the
epistemic gap clearly would make a difference: if it didn’t exist, it
may well not be reasonable to deliberate, and so my bodily movements
might be quite different.

Note that, on the view of practical reasoning I am suggesting,
psychological processes of rational decision making do matter in a
straightforward sense: if my deliberations had gone differently (and
had thus issued in a different judgment as to what is best,
all-things-considered), then my decisions and bodily movements would
have been different. It is not the case that the bodily movements
are going to be exactly the same, regardless of how my deliberations
go. This surely is the important point about the causal efficacy
of practical reasoning. So “the incredibly elaborate, complex,
sensitive, and—above all—biologically expensive system of human and
animal conscious rational decision making” does make a difference to
the life and survival of organisms. Surely what is evolutionarily
important in our capacities for practical reasoning is a certain
capacity to recognize and respond to reasons; it seems bizarre to
suppose that what is crucial to our survival—and the crowning glory of
evolution--is
the experience of the causal insufficiency of our mental states!
If
there is a gap here at all, it is in Searle’s argument.

III.4. Kantian approaches. I further contend that I can at the
same time (or from the same “perspective”) acknowledge both that my
choice is causally determined (and thus that I have but one path
genuinely available to me) and deliberate about which choice to
make. That is, when I am engaged in practical reasoning and
deliberation, I can continue to believe, and to acknowledge, that I am
causally determined and thus not free. This follows from the fact
that the theses I acknowledge are metaphysical contentions the truth of
which can leave an epistemic gap and from the distinctive purpose of
practical reasoning. I can thus accept that the characteristic
purposes of theoretical and practical reasoning diverge, while
maintaining that an agent engaged in practical reasoning can in fact
continue to hold such deliverances of theoretical reasoning as that he
is causally determined and thus not free (in the sense of possessing
alternative possibilities, construed incompatibilistically).

My view here is in stark contrast with the “neo-Kantian”
two-perspective approach developed by such philosophers as Hilary Bok
and Christine Korsgaard. For example, Hilary Bok says:

If, when we engage in practical reasoning, we must regard ourselves as
standing in the order of reasons rather than the order of causes, and
if those orders are distinguished from one another by the relations of
necessity to which they appeal, when we engage in practical reasoning
we will not regard
ourselves as subject to the same sort of necessity appealed to by
theoretical
reason. Theoretical necessity is causal: one object acts on
another,
thereby rendering some change in the latter necessary. To see
oneself
as necessitated in this way is to see oneself as passive: acted on
rather
than acting.

Further, she says:

Because we regard ourselves as subject not to causal but to rational
necessity, when we engage in practical reasoning we regard ourselves
not as the passive object of external forces but as determining our own
conduct; not as acted on by things outside us but as choosing for
reasons that we are free to accept or reject. And we regard these
choices not as events that might simply befall us and with which we
might or might not identify but as necessarily our own. For these
reasons, as Christine Korsgaard writes, ‘[a]t the moment of decision,
you must regard yourself as the author of your action.’

But whereas I agree that at the moment of decision, one must in some
suitable sense see oneself as the author of one’s decision, I do not
think that it follows that one must at that moment believe (either
occurrently or dispositionally) that one is not causally
determined. I certainly do not think that
it should be accepted as uncontroversial that it follows from my
choice’s being causally determined that I am not the author of it or
that I am merely passive with respect to it—these claims require
argumentation, as
there are ways of seeking to explain authorship and the difference
between
activity and passivity that are consistent with causal
determinism.

Additionally, the quotations from Korsgaard and Bok raise the vexing
issue of the relationship between their notion of “regarding” and the
more ordinary notion of “believing.” With respect to this issue,
consider the following passage from Bok:

Insofar as regarding our choices as caused involves regarding them as
determined by antecedent events, we cannot regard ourselves as caused
to
choose as we do when we engage in practical reasoning. [Here Bok
inserts
a footnote pointing us to Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of
Morals,
p. 50 (Ak. 448); and Korsaard, “Morality as Freedom,” pp. 162-3.]
This is not because we believe we are not caused to choose as we do,
but because
when we engage in practical reasoning, we are concerned with another
form
of determination.

Bok, however, faces the following dilemma. When we engage in
practical reasoning, either we do in fact believe that we are not
causally determined or we do not so believe. If we do, then it is
obvious that a belief we have from the practical perspective can come
into direct conflict with a belief we could have from the theoretical
perspective. But it is a central feature of Bok’s approach that
the two perspectives cannot conflict in this way; the claim that the
two perspectives cannot conflict is essential for Bok’s project of
showing freedom to be compatible with
causal determinism.

Thus it seems as if Bok must say that, when we engage in
practical reasoning, we do not believe (even dispositionally) that we
are not causally determined. (I suppose the picture here is that,
when one takes up the practical perspective, one does not believe in
either causal determinism or its denial—one fails to form either of
these beliefs.) But this leaves the notion of “regarding”
somewhat mysterious; it seems as if from the practical
perspective we regard ourselves as not subject
to causal necessity but we do not believe we are not subject to causal
necessity.

But if regarding is prized apart from believing in this way, what
exactly is it to regard ourselves as not subject to causal necessity?
Further, I find it unattractive to suppose that from the
practical perspective I cannot have (even dispositionally) a belief
such as that causal determinism is
false. Of course, the mere fact that, when engaged in practical
reasoning,
I am “concerned with” another form of necessitation does not
entail that I do not—perhaps dispositionally—believe that I am
in fact subject to causal necessitation. After all, when I am
“concerned
with” the leaking plumbing in my house, it does not follow that I do
not believe (perhaps dispositionally) that the house is painted white
(or
that George Washington was the first President of the United
States).
If I do in fact have the belief that causal determinism is false, then
why
should I be precluded from having access (even dispositionally) to this
belief
when I take up the practical perspective? On this picture, the
practical
perspective is epistemically partitioned off from the rest of the agent
in
a puzzling way. The resulting compartmentalization is very
unattractive,
and, as I have suggested above, unnecessary.

IV. Moral Responsibility

IV. 1. The Concept of Moral Responsibility. Some philosophers
have argued that if we lacked free will (in the sense that involves
alternative possibilities), then we could not legitimately be
considered morally responsible agents. There are, of course,
different accounts of the concept of moral responsibility, as well as
its conditions of application. I will simply sketch three views
about the concept (or “nature”) of moral
responsibility; an elaboration of these accounts is beyond the scope of
this
paper.

On the first view about the nature of moral responsibility, an agent’s
moral responsibility consists in his or her being an appropriate
candidate for ascriptions of certain ethical predicates, such as
“good,” “bad,” “courageous,” “charitable,” “dastardly,” “cruel,” and so
forth. The view is often put in terms of a metaphor; on this
approach, an agent is morally responsible insofar as
he has a “moral ledger.” The ascription of moral predicates
corresponds to making marks on the ledger.

A second view contends that when an agent is morally responsible for
some behavior, it would not be inappropriate to expect the agent to
provide an explanation of the behavior in question. On this view,
when the agent is morally responsible in this sense, it follows that he
has a moral ledger; but it is the expectation that the agent can
provide a certain sort of explanation that is the essence of moral
responsibility.

A third sort of account of the nature of moral responsibility follows
Peter Strawson. On this view, roughly speaking, an individual is
morally responsible for some behavior in virtue of being an apt target
for
one of the “reactive attitudes” on the basis of the behavior.
According to Strawson, the reactive attitudes include gratitude,
indignation, resentment, love, respect, and forgiveness, and they
manifest our involvement with other human beings in distinctively
interpersonal relationships. There are various versions of
the “Strawsonian” approach to the concept of moral responsibility.

In what follows I shall not take a stand on the correct account of the
concept of moral responsibility. I shall simply speak of moral
responsibility and let the reader fill in her favorite account of its
nature. No matter what particular account of the concept of moral
responsibility one accepts, it is clear that if it turned out that
human beings lacked free will, there would be a deep and disturbing
challenge to the idea that we are in fact
morally responsible.

IV. 2. The Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) and the
Frankfurt-type Examples. As I suggested above, we naturally think that
the future is a garden of forking paths—that we at least at some
important points in our
lives have more than one path branching into the future. If this
intuitive picture turned out to be false, then it would seem that we
could not legitimately be held morally responsible for our
behavior. After all, if I don’t have free will in a sense that
involves alternative possibilities, then
I have to choose (and do) what I actually choose (and do). And if
I have to choose what I do in fact choose, then presumably I am
compelled
so to choose, and cannot fairly be considered morally responsible for
my
choice. It is very plausible, then, to accept something like the
“Principle
of Alternative Possibilities” (PAP), according to which an agent is
morally responsible for (say) an action only if he could have done
otherwise.
If (PAP) is true, then moral responsibility requires free will
(in
the sense that involves alternative possibilities); and if causal
determinism
rules out such alternative possibilities, it would thereby rule out
moral
responsibility.

Peter van Inwagen gives a particularly pointed defense of (PAP):

If we do not have free will, then there is no such thing as moral
responsibility. This proposition, one might think, certainly
deserves to be a commonplace. If someone charges you with, say,
lying, and if you can convince him that it was simply not within your
power not to lie, then it would seem that you have done all that is
necessary to absolve yourself of responsibility for lying.
… without free will there is no moral responsibility: if moral
responsibility exists, then someone is morally responsible for
something
he has done or for something he has left undone; to be morally
responsible
for some act or failure to act is at least to be able to have acted
otherwise,
whatever else it may involve; to be able to have acted otherwise is to
have
free will. Therefore, if moral responsibility exists, someone has
free
will. Therefore, if no one has free will, moral responsibility
does
not exist.

Whereas (PAP) might appear to be an obvious truth, it has been
questioned by some philosophers. These philosophers contend (in
one way or another) that what matters for moral responsibility is how
the relevant choice or action is brought about, not whether the agent
has alternative possibilities available to him. In contemporary
philosophy, Harry Frankfurt has helped to focus the case against (PAP)
with a set of examples with a characteristic structure. These
examples contain failsafe mechanisms that (allegedly) both make it the
case that the agent has no (relevant) alternative possibilities and
also play no role in the agent’s actual choice and action.
Frankfurt says that if something plays no role in the agent’s choice
and action, then it cannot be relevant to his moral responsibility;
thus, it would follow that the mechanisms in question both make it the
case that the agent has no alternative possibilities and do not thereby
threaten the agent’s moral responsibility.

Here is a version of my favorite “Frankfurt-type case.” Jones is
in a voting booth deliberating about whether to vote for the Democrat
or the Republican. After weighing reasons and deliberating in the
“normal” way, he chooses to vote for the Democrat. Unbeknownst to
him, Black, a neurosurgeon with Democratic sympathies, has implanted a
device in Jones’s brain which monitors Jones’s brain activities.
If he is about to choose to vote Democratic, the device does not
intervene. If, however, Jones is about to choose to vote
Republican, the device triggers an intervention which involves
electronic stimulation of the brain sufficient to produce
a choice to vote for the Democrat and an actual vote for the Democrat.

Now one might ask how the device can tell whether Jones is about to
choose to vote Republican or Democratic. Frankfurt himself did
not say much about this difficult problem, except that “Black is an
excellent judge of such things.” We can however add a “prior
sign” to the case as follows. If Jones is about to choose at T2
to vote for the Democrat at T3, he shows some involuntary sign—say a
blush, a furrowed brow, or a neurological pattern in his brain readable
by some sort
of “neuroscope”—at T1. If it detects this, Black’s device does
not intervene. But if Jones is about to choose at T2 to vote
Republican at T3, he shows a different involuntary sign at T1.
This would trigger Black’s device to intervene and cause Jones to
choose at T2 to vote for the Democrat and actually to vote for the
Democrat at T3.

It seems that Black’s device is precisely the kind of failsafe device
described above: it plays no role in Jones’s deliberations,
choice, or action, and yet its presence renders it true that Jones
could not have done otherwise than choose and vote Democratic.
Indeed, it seems that in this case Jones freely chooses to vote
Democratic, freely does so, and can be considered morally responsible
for his choice and action, even though he does not have alternative
possibilities (given the presence of Black’s device). This
suggests that there is a kind of freedom or control—corresponding to
choosing and acting freely--that does not require alternative
possibilities, and that this sort of control (and not the
alternative-possibilities control) is the freedom-relevant condition
necessary for moral responsibility. There seem to be two kinds of
freedom or control, and the Frankfurt-type
examples help us to prize them apart. It appears, then,
that
we have a counterexample to (PAP).

IV.3.A Dilemma for the Frankfurt-type Examples. The suggestion
(emerging from the Frankfurt-type examples) that moral responsibility
does not require free will in the sense that involves alternative
possibilities has not been entirely irresistible. In fact, a huge
literature has developed surrounding these examples. Consider the
following dilemma in response to the Frankfurt-type examples.
Notice that in the typical presentation of the examples
(as above) it is not made explicit whether causal determinism
obtains.
So suppose first that causal determinism obtains in the example.
Now
it would seem question-begging to conclude straightforwardly from the
example that Jones is morally responsible for voting for the Democrat;
after all, the issue of whether causal determinism is compatible with
moral responsibility is in dispute. But if it is assumed that
causal determinism is false, and specifically that there is no
deterministic relationship between the prior sign at T1 and Jones’s
subsequent choice at T2, then Jones would appear to have free will at
(or just prior to) T2: he can at least begin to
choose to vote for the Democrat. After all, given the prior sign
and
the laws of nature, it does not follow that Jones will choose at T2 to
vote
for the Democrat (on the current assumption of causal
indeterminism). So, the proponent of the dilemma says that either
Jones is not morally responsible or there are alternative possibilities
for Jones: one does not have a single context in which it is both true
that Jones has no alternative possibilities and is morally responsible
for his choice and action.

This is indeed a worrisome challenge to the conclusion that I (and
others) draw from the Frankfurt-type examples—that (PAP) is
false. Elsewhere I have presented a strategy of response to the
dilemma. Here I wish briefly to sketch this response, and then
to consider an important objection to it.

IV.4. A Response to the Dilemma. First consider the possibility that
causal determinism is false (in the relevant way). Various
philosophers have proposed that one can construct versions of the
Frankfurt-type cases in which the agent is morally responsible and yet
there are no alternatives at all, or at least no robust alternatives.
I think it is promising that
such an example can be constructed, although I shall not attempt to
defend
this possibility here.

Suppose that causal determinism is true. That is, suppose that
there is indeed a causally deterministic relationship between the sign
exhibited at T1 and Jones’s choice to vote for the Democrat at
T2. Now it follows, given the argument for the incompatibility of
causal determinism and the sort of control that involves alternative
possibilities, that Jones does not have the power at T2 to refrain from
choosing to vote Democratic at T2. It is not my strategy,
however, simply to claim that Jones is obviously morally responsible
for his choice; I agree that this would not be dialectically kosher.

Rather, I begin by suggesting that the fact that Black’s device
would intervene and ensure that Jones would choose to vote for the
Democrat
(and indeed vote for the Democrat), if Jones had shown a different sign
at T1, does not in itself show that Jones is not morally responsible
for
his actual choice (if he is in fact not morally responsible).
That
is, I am not supposing at this point that Jones is morally responsible
for
his actual choice at T2 to vote for the Democrat. Rather, I am
saying
that the fact that he cannot do otherwise does not in itself (and apart
from
indicating or pointing to some other fact) make it the case that Jones
is
not morally responsible for his choice at T2.

It seems evident to me that the fact that Black’s device would
intervene in the counterfactual scenario and ensure that Jones choose
to vote for the Democrat is irrelevant to the “grounding” of Jones’s
actual moral responsibility for choosing to vote for the Democrat (and
actually doing so). Something grounds moral responsibility, in
the sense in question,
insofar as it explains (or helps to explain) why the agent is morally
responsible,
apart from simply being an indicator of something else that in fact
explains
the agent’s moral responsibility. Black’s counterfactual
intervention does not make any difference as to Jones’s moral
responsibility;
if Black’s device were “subtracted” from the example (to
use Frankfurt’s phrase), this would not change my assessment
of Jones’s moral responsibility in any way. Thus, I think that
the example renders it plausible (although it does not decisively
establish)
that Jones’s lack of alternative possibilities is irrelevant to the
grounding of Jones’s moral responsibility.

It is important to be a bit more careful here. I have claimed
that consideration of the example of Jones (a typical Frankfurt-type
case) should first elicit the intuition that the fact that there is a
failsafe device present that would intervene in the counterfactual
scenario is irrelevant to the grounding of Jones’s moral
responsibility. My contention is that this then suggests that
even if Jones had no alternative possibilities at all, this would be
irrelevant to the grounding of his moral responsibility. It would
then follow that in a causally deterministic world, in which it is
assumed that Jones has no alternative possibilities at all, his lack of
alternative possibilities would be irrelevant to the grounding of his
moral responsibility. That is, his lack of alternative
possibilities cannot in itself and apart from indicating something else
explain why Jones is not morally responsible, if Jones is in fact not
morally responsible.

In my view, this then is the moral of the Frankfurt-type cases.
They suggest that alternative possibilities are irrelevant to the
grounding of moral responsibility. Thus they are an important
step
along the way toward arguing that causal determinism is compatible with
moral
responsibility. Of course, someone might say that alternative
possibilities
are a necessary condition for moral responsibility because their
presence
indicates some other factor (perhaps causal indeterminism in the actual
sequence)
which must be present for there to be moral responsibility. This
is
a perfectly reasonable position, which can then be addressed; I shall
briefly
discuss this maneuver below. But it does not diminish the
importance
of the moral of the Frankfurt-type cases; in my view, once one
establishes
that alternative possibilities are irrelevant to the grounding of moral
responsibility, it is considerably easier to argue that causal
determinism (and the lack of
alternative possibilities) is compatible with moral responsibility.

IV.5. A Recent Objection and a Further Reply. Before I address the
contention that alternative possibilities indicate some other factor
that grounds moral responsibility, I wish to consider a recent
objection to my strategy for dealing with the “deterministic” horn of
the dilemmatic attack on the Frankfurt-type examples. My
contention is that Black’s presence and counterfactual intervention is
irrelevant to the grounding of moral responsibility. But someone
might grant this, while insisting that it is not pertinent, since it is
not Black’s counterfactual intervention, but the condition of the world
at T1 (including the sign Jones exhibits) that
makes it true that Jones does not have it in his power at T2 to choose
to
vote for the Democrat. If it is the condition of the world at T1
that
makes it true that Jones cannot at T2 choose to vote for the Democrat,
then
it is not so obvious that what makes it the case that Jones cannot at
T2
choose otherwise is irrelevant to the grounding of Jones’ moral
responsibility.
This line of attack has been developed by Stewart Goetz.

Goetz says:

[The Frankfurt-style example] creates the appearance that it is Black’s
device, which is in the alternative sequence of events, that makes it
the case that Jones is not free to choose otherwise. This
appearance is illusory because without the obtaining of causal
determinism in the actual sequence of events, the device cannot prevent
Jones from making an alternative choice, and with causal determinism in
the actual sequence of events it is not the device that prevents Jones
from making an alternative choice. In short, if Jones is not free
to choose otherwise, it is because of the occurrence of causal
determinism in the actual sequence of events and not because of Black’s
device in the alternative sequence.

Goetz goes on to say:

[Fischer’s strategy] requires the truth of causal determinism in order
to create the illusion that it is the presence of something in the
alternative sequence of events (e.g., Black’s device) that makes it the
case that Jones is not free to choose otherwise. It is only
through this illusion that one is tempted to endorse the
conclusion of the first step of Fischer’s argument, which is that the
lack of alternative possibilities is not sufficient for the lack of
moral responsibility, and, thereby, Jones might be morally responsible
even though he is not free to choose otherwise. Once this
illusion is exposed, one’s initial conviction that the lack of an
alternative choice is sufficient for the lack of moral responsibility
is vindicated.

Goetz’s point could be put as follows. What really makes it the
case that Jones cannot choose otherwise at T2 is the prior state of
the world together with the laws of nature. In other words, what
makes
it the case that Jones lacks an alternative possibility at T2 is causal
determination in the actual sequence. So it is quite beside the
point that Black’s counterfactual intervention is irrelevant to the
grounding of Jones’s moral responsibility; after all, it is not Black’s
counterfactual intervention that makes it the case that Jones cannot
choose otherwise at T2. Thus we do not have a case in which the
fact that the agent could not have chosen (or done) otherwise is
irrelevant to the grounding of his moral responsibility.

Frankfurt-type scenarios are cases in which an action is “causally
overdetermined.” The overdetermination is considered
“pre-emptive,” rather than “simultaneous.” In simultaneous
overdetermination, two causal sequences both operate and actually issue
in the overdetermined action (or event). In pre-emptive
overdetermination, some event is actually caused in a certain way, and
would have been caused in a different way, had the actual causal
sequence not taken place. So, in the Frankfurt-type scenario
presented above, Black’s device is part of what makes it the case that
Jones’s choice at T2 is pre-emptively overdetermined.

What is also of note is that in these scenarios Jones’s inability to
choose (or do) otherwise is also overdetermined. (I would
describe the overdetermination here as simultaneous, rather than
pre-emptive; but is it delicate, as the thing in question is a fact—a
modal fact—rather than a concrete action or event.) It is not
only the act that is overdetermined; it is also the agent’s lack of
alternative possibilities. So, my response to Goetz is as follows.

In the Frankfurt-type scenario, two causes make it the case that Jones
is unable to choose otherwise at T2: the prior condition of the world
(together with the laws of nature) and Black’s counterfactual
intervention. What the examples show is that the mere fact
that Jones is unable to choose otherwise does not in itself establish
that Jones is not morally responsible for his choice. This is
because Black’s counterfactual intervention is one of the factors that
make it the case that Jones is unable to choose otherwise at T2, and
yet it is irrelevant to the grounding of Jones’s moral
responsibility. Considering this factor (the counterfactual
intervention), and bracketing any other factor that might make it the
case that Jones is unable to choose otherwise at T2, it seems to me
that Jones may well be
morally responsible for his action. The mere fact that he lacks
alternative possibilities, then, cannot in itself be the reason that
Jones is not morally responsible, if indeed he is not morally
responsible.

Now of course it is also true that the prior condition of the world
together with the natural laws makes it the case that Jones lacks
alternative possibilities. But, given that the mere fact of
lacking alternative possibilities does not in itself rule out moral
responsibility, why should this way of lacking alternative
possibilities rule out moral responsibility? Why exactly should
the significance of causal determination be that it rules out moral
responsibility? This is exactly what the Frankfurt-type examples
call into question.

In an interesting passage, Goetz states:

The proponent of PAP thinks that the lack of the freedom to choose
otherwise does not by itself explain the absence of moral
responsibility. This is because he believes that when this lack
obtains, its obtaining is itself explained by, and can only be
explained by, the occurrence of causal determinism in the actual
sequence of events. What the advocate of PAP believes, then, is
that when an agent is not morally responsible because he is not free to
choose otherwise, he lacks moral responsibility not simply because he
is not free to choose otherwise but because he is not free to choose
otherwise because of causal determinism.

Precisely this move is made by Derk Pereboom. But why exactly
does it matter that causal determination rules out alternative
possibilities? If the mere fact of the lack of alternative
possibilities does not in itself rule out moral responsibility, why
would a particular way of expunging alternative possibilities rule out
moral responsibility? Granted that causal determination is a
certain way of taking away alternative possibilities. Why should
it be thought that causal determination threatens moral responsibility
in virtue of constituting a way of ruling out alternative
possibilities? The Frankfurt-type examples, then, suggest that
one needs to look in a different direction if one seeks to argue that
causal determination rules out moral responsibility.

The dialectic could be put somewhat differently. There can be two
different ways in which some factor renders an agent unable to choose
or do otherwise (or eliminates alternative possibilities). In one
way, the factor does not play a role in the actual sequence; it does
not flow
through the actual course of events. In another way, the factor
does
flow through the actual sequence. The Frankfurt-type scenarios
are
all cases in which the ability-undermining factor does not play a role
in
the actual sequence leading to the relevant choice and action. So
it
seems unfair to extrapolate from the Frankfurt-type cases to the other
sort
of cases; that is, even if we are inclined to say that the agent is
morally
responsible in the Frankfurt-type cases, it would not follow that the
agent
is morally responsible in a causally deterministic world.

To reply. I grant that the Frankfurt-type examples are not
decisive. That is, they do not provide examples that would
absolutely and uncontroversially decide the issue about the
relationship between causal determinism and moral responsibility.
But I certainly do not believe that it is reasonable to expect such
examples here—or in any contentious area of philosophy! And, as I
argued above, the Frankfurt-type examples suggest that if causal
determination is indeed problematic, it is not so in virtue of flowing
through the actual sequence and thereby ruling out alternative
possibilities.

IV.6. Source Incompatibilism. So far I have been primarily concerned
with the issue of whether alternative possibilities are relevant to the
grounding of moral responsibility. As I pointed out above, even
if they are irrelevant to the grounding of responsibility, they may
nevertheless be relevant to
responsibility as a sign of something else which in fact grounds moral
responsibility. Many years ago I emphasized that the mere fact
that the Frankfurt-type examples show that alternative possibilities
are not required for moral responsibility does not in itself show that
causal determinism is compatible with moral
responsibility. I pointed out that causal determinism is a
thesis
about the “actual sequence,” and thus that it does not follow
from the falsity of (PAP) that causal determinism is compatible with
moral
responsibility. As I put it:

Both the compatibilist and the incompatibilist alike can unite in
conceding that enough information is encoded in the actual sequence to
ground our responsibility attributions; as philosophers we need to
decode this information and see
whether it is consistent with deterministic causation.

In my subsequent work I have explored various ways in which it might be
thought that causal determination in the actual sequence rules out
moral
responsibility. I have in the end concluded that causal
determination
in the actual sequence does not rule out moral responsibility.

Other philosophers have disagreed, contending that causal determination
in the actual sequence rules out moral responsibility “directly” (and
not in virtue of expunging alternative possibilities) . Robert
Kane has argued that in order to be morally responsible, we have to
meet a condition of “ultimacy,” according to which the “causal buck
must stop here”; that is, we cannot be mere intermediate links in a
causally deterministic sequence which begins prior to our births.
Similarly, Laura Ekstrom argues that the past and laws
“push” us into our choices and actions, if causal determinism is
true. She thus argues that causal determination in the actual
sequence is incompatible with moral responsibility.
Additionally, although Derk Pereboom believes that versions of the
Frankfurt-type examples successfully show that (PAP) is false, he
nevertheless defends the following principle:

An action is free in the sense required for moral responsibility only
if it is not produced by a deterministic process that traces back to
causal factors beyond the agent’s control.

I believe that none of the arguments purporting to show that causal
determination in the actual sequence rules out moral responsibility is
particularly strong, although this of course is a highly contentious
matter. One of the difficulties is to see how to argue for the
incompatibility claim; after all, Pereboom’s principle seems to be a
simple restatement of incompatibilism about causal determinism
and moral responsibility, not an argument for it. In any case, I
would contend that the Frankfurt-type cases at
least help us to make progress toward defending the compatibility of
causal determinism and moral responsibility insofar as they help us to
take a very important first step: they render it plausible (although
they do not decisively establish) that the sort of free will that
involves alternative possibilities does not ground attributions of
moral responsibility, that is, it does not in itself and apart from
indicating some other factor explain why we are morally
responsible, if we are in fact morally responsible.

V. Ethical Judgments

V.1. Judgments of Deontic Morality. Above I pointed out that there are
various accounts of the concept of moral responsibility. On the
“ledger view,” if an agent is morally responsible, then he has a moral
ledger—the marks correspond to various sorts of moral judgments.
Some philosophers hold that these judgments include claims about
what the agent ought and ought not to do, and what is right or wrong
for the individual to do. These philosophers thus connect moral
responsibility tightly to the appropriateness of judgments about ought,
ought not, right, and wrong. Peter van Inwagen appears to make
this sort of connection in the continuation of a passage quoted above:

If someone charges you with, say, lying, and if you can convince him
that it was simply not within your power not to lie, then it would seem
that you have done all that is necessary to absolve yourself of
responsibility for lying. Your accuser cannot say, ‘I concede it
was not within your power not to lie; none the less you ought not to
have lied’.

On this sort of approach to moral responsibility, if (contrary to van
Inwagen) one has successfully defended the compatibility of causal
determinism
(and the lack of the sort of free will that involves alternative
possibilities) with moral responsibility, one has thereby defended the
compatibility of causal determinism (and the lack of free will) with
judgments employing “ought,” “ought not,” “right,” and “wrong.”
But one might accept an alternative account of the concept of moral
responsibility, or even a ledger view according to which the relevant
“marks” correspond to (say) “goodness” and “badness,” but not “ought,”
“ought not,” and so forth. If one accepted (say) a Strawsonian
account of moral responsibility (or the sort
of ledger view just sketched), it might be that causal determinism is
compatible
with moral responsibility but not with judgments employing “ought,”
“ought not,” “right,” and “wrong.” This is precisely the view
held by Ishtiyaque Haji. Haji accepts the conclusion of the
Frankfurt-type cases that moral responsibility does not require
alternative possibilities and further that it is compatible with causal
determinism; but he rejects the contention that causal determinism is
compatible with judgments employing “obligation,” “ought,” “ought not,”
“right,” and “wrong.” (Following Haji, let us call the latter
“judgments of deontic morality.”) On this sort of view, the
Strawsonian “reactive attitudes” are prized apart from the judgments of
deontic morality, and whereas the former are compatible with causal
determinism, the latter are not. (Note that Haji distinguishes
judgments pertaining to notions such “goodness” and “badness” from the
judgments of deontic morality; he is willing to concede that the former
sorts of judgments are entirely compatible with causal determinism.)

Why might one think that the judgments of deontic morality are
incompatible with causal determinism? I will treat “ought not”
and “wrong” as interchangeable, and “ought” and “obligatory” as
interchangeable. I shall lay out the argument with respect to
“wrong.” It will be easy to see how to construct parallel
arguments for the other judgments of deontic morality. Here is a
simple version of the argument:

1. Suppose some individual, John, does something morally
wrong.
2. If John’s Xing was wrong, then he ought to have done
something else instead.
3. If John ought to have done something else instead, then
he could have done something else instead.
4. So John could have done something else instead.
5. But if causal determinism is true, then John could not
have done anything other than he actually did.
6. So, if causal determinism is true, it cannot be the
case that John’s Xing was wrong.

This is a potent and disturbing argument. I have sought to argue
that causal determinism is compatible with moral responsibility.
This result would be considerably less interesting if causal
determinism were nevertheless incompatible with the central judgments
of deontic morality. There are however various ways of seeking to
block the conclusion of the argument. I have discussed the
rejection of premise 2 elsewhere. Here however I shall focus on
the rejection of premise 3 (and thus the rejection of the
ought-implies-can maxim (henceforth, “the Maxim”).

V.2 Copp’s Defense of the Maxim. I believe that there are
Frankfurt-type omissions cases that are relevantly similar to
Frankfurt-type
cases with respect to actions. That is, there are cases in which
an
agent is morally responsible for not Xing, although he cannot in fact
X.
Some of these are cases in which an agent is blameworthy for not
Xing
and yet he cannot X. In fact, I believe that anyone who accepts
the
Frankfurt-type action cases must accept that there are such
omissions-cases.
Further, the basic intuitions elicited by the Frankfurt-type
cases
conflict with the Maxim and cast doubt on its intuitive
plausibility.
Although this certainly does not decisively refute the maxim, it does
suggest
that it is not ad hoc for anyone who accepts that the Frankfurt-type
cases
show that moral responsibility does not require alternative
possibilities
to reject the Maxim.

But rejection of the Maxim comes at a steep price. In the most
detailed, sustained, and penetrating discussion of the motivation for
the Maxim of which I am aware, David Copp contends that it is
preferable to preserve the Maxim than to reject PAP on the basis of the
Frankfurt-type cases (or on any
other basis). Copp presents two primary arguments on behalf of
the
Maxim, and it will be useful to discuss each of them.

Copp contends that there is a conflict between the interpretation of
the Frankfurt-type cases according to which they show that moral
responsibility does not require alternative possibilities and the
Maxim. According to Copp, “… [this] is not a conflict between
intuition and a recherché theoretical proposition. It is a
conflict among intuitions.” Copp
says:

The most basic motivation for the Maxim, it seems to me, begins with
the thought that it would be unfair to expect a person to do something,
or to demand or require that she do it, if she lacked the ability to do
it. This thought is about what we might call
‘agent-requirements,’ which arise in cases in which an authoritative
agent requires someone under her authority or jurisdiction to do
something. An example might be a situation in which a boss
requires an employee to do something that the employee lacks the
ability to do. A supervisor at the post office might demand that
a mail carrier cook a soufflé for everyone in the post office in
the next five minutes when the mail carrier does not even know what
a soufflé is. We can imagine many similar cases, including
cases
in which a parent expects a child to do something she cannot do, or a
teacher
requires a student to do something she cannot do, or a sergeant
requires
a recruit to do something she cannot do. The intuition is that
agent-requirements
of this kind are morally unfair when the person of whom the demand is
made
lacks the ability to comply.

Copp goes on to claim that although the intution elicited above is
about “agent-requirements” rather than “moral requirements,” he
contends that a similar point applies to moral requirements. As
Copp puts it, “if there would be unfairness in the latter case [the
mere agent-requirement case], then there is surely a kind of unfairness
in the moral requirement in the former case even if there is no agent
who is being unfair.” So the first argument in favor of the
Maxim is the intuition that it would be unfair to morally require
someone to do something, if he cannot do the thing in question.

Copp’s second argument in favor of the Maxim is based on meta-ethical
considerations about the “point” of moral requirements. Copp says:

The heart of the argument is roughly as follows: any moral theory must
somehow account for, or make room for, the intuition that there is a
point to requiring an action, namely, crudely, to get it done.
Clearly, moreover,
an action will not be done if the prospective actor cannot perform
it.

… The argument can be summarized as follows. If an agent
is morally required to do A in a particular situation, then all other
options she faces are morally ruled out. If the agent cannot do
A, then doing A is not among her options. Hence, if an agent is
morally required to do A but cannot do A, then all of her options are
morally ruled out. But information that an agent is morally
required to do something provides her with guidance among her options
by distinguishing between options that are morally ruled out and
options that are not morally ruled out. If all of an agent’s
options are morally ruled out by a moral requirement, then information
about the requirement cannot provide her with such guidance.
Given then that moral requirements have a characteristic relevance to
our decisions, by distinguishing between options that are morally ruled
out and options that are not morally ruled out, it follows that if a
person cannot do A, it is not the case that she is morally required to
do A. That is, the Maxim follows from the intuition about the
relevance of moral requirements to decision-making.

Copp thus offers two strategies for motivating the Maxim: the fairness
argument and the argument from the relevance of moral requirements to
decision-making. He thus points out that if one favors one’s
intuition that the Frankfurt-type examples show (albeit not decisively)
that PAP is to be rejected, then one must give up strong intuitions
about fairness and the relationship between morality and practical
reasoning. Copp thinks that giving up these latter intuitions
would be too steep a price to pay. In accepting PAP, however,
Copp admits that his view might be open to incompatibilist worries; if
causal determinism turned out to be true along with PAP, then there
emerges the danger that no one could legitimately be accountable
(blameworthy) for what they do. In the end, Copp concludes that
“any adequate analysis of the ability to act must be
compatibilist. It must be such that the ability to do something
other than what one actually does is compatible with determinism.”

Let us first consider Copp’s argument from fairness. More
specifically, the contention is that it would be unfair to hold someone
blameworthy for failing to do X, if he could not do X. In order
to
bolster this judgment, Copp invokes an example in which it does seem
unfair
to require a mail carrier to cook a soufflé for everyone in the
post
office in five minutes. But I would reply that it is crucial to
distinguish
two importantly different sorts of omissions: “simple” and “complex”
omissions. If one focuses solely on complex omissions, it does
indeed
seem as if it would be unfair to hold an individual blameworthy for
failing
to do X, if he is unable to do X. But my intuitions about simple
omissions
are quite different.

Consider an example offered by Harry Frankfurt:

Imagine that a person—call him ‘Stanley’—deliberately keeps himself
very still. He refrains, for some reason, from moving his body at
all. … suppose that here is someone with a powerful interest in
having Stanley refrain from making any deliberate movements, who
arranges things in such a way that Stanley will be stricken with
general paralysis if he shows any inclination to move.
Nonetheless, Stanley may keep himself still quite on his own altogether
independently of this person’s
schemes. Why should Stanley not be morally responsible for
keeping
still, in that case, just as much as if there had been nothing to
prevent
him from moving had he chosen to do so?

I agree with Frankfurt here. And surely Stanley could be
considered blameworthy, should something morally important hang on his
moving his body rather than keeping still.

Stanley’s not moving his body, or refraining from moving, is a “simple
omission”: the omission is entirely constituted by his failure to move
his body. There are many more such omissions, and in these cases
it is plausible that the agents are indeed morally responsible—and
potentially morally blameworthy—although they could not have refrained
from keeping still.

I do not have any “proof” of my contention that in simple
omissions, an agent can be blameworthy for failing to do X, even though
he could not have done X. It seems to me however that this is a
completely
reasonable intuition, shared by many philosophers and supported by a
range
of examples. I agree however that it seems upon initial
consideration
that in cases of complex omissions, an agent cannot be blameworthy for
failing
to do X, unless he can in fact do X.

My purpose here is simply to suggest that there are cases in which an
agent can legitimately be considered blameworthy for failing to do X,
although he could not have done X. I would contend that Copp
fails to see this because he focuses entirely on a proper subset of
cases—the complex omissions. If I am correct, then the argument
from fairness is vitiated—there are cases in which it would not be
unfair to blame someone for failing to do something he could not do
(and never could do).

Now I suppose someone could say that because it is obviously unfair to
blame someone for his failure in the complex omissions cases, we should
conclude that it would also be unfair to blame the agent in the simple
omissions cases. But I think that this gets the dialectic wrong:
we are supposed to be generating general principles by reference to
intuitions about all of the relevant
cases. It would seem inappropriate to generate such a principle
based
on a proper subset of the cases, and then apply it to all of the cases,
even when it does not seem to yield the correct results in all of the
cases.

What would be ideal is a theory that explains exactly why the agents
are indeed morally responsible in the simple omissions cases and not
morally responsible in the complex omissions cases (discussed above),
Such an explanation would obviously not invoke the notion of
inability to do otherwise, lest it lead to implausible results in the
simple omissions cases. I
(and my co-author) have offered just such a theory of moral
responsibility for omissions; on this approach, moral responsibility is
associated with freedom
(or control), but not the sort of freedom (or control) that involves
alternative
possibilities. Quite apart from whether this theory is adequate,
my
point here is that Copp has not really motivated the central claim of
the
argument for fairness: he has relied on only a proper subset of the
relevant
data.

Copp’s second argument in favor of the Maxim pertains to the role of
moral requirements in guiding action. I agree that moral
requirements play a distinctive and important role in guiding our
practical reasoning (and, thus, our behavior). But, as above in
our discussion of practical reasoning and deliberation, it is crucial
to distinguish between genuine metaphysical
possibilities and possibilities, for all the agent knows, or “epistemic
possibility.” An epistemic possibility is not ruled out by the
agent’s knowledge. Indispensable to the proper analysis of
deliberation
and also the Frankfurt-type examples is the fact that one’s
metaphysical
possibilities (the paths that are genuinely available to one) may
diverge
from one’s epistemic possibilities (that paths that are, for all one
knows, available to one). I would contend that moral requirements
rule
out certain of the courses of action that are, for all we know, open to
us—certain
epistemic possibilities.

Recall Copp’s argument, which begins as follows:

If an agent is morally required to do A in a particular situation, then
all other options she faces are morally ruled out. If the agent
cannot do A, then doing A is not among her options. Hence, if an
agent is morally required to do A but cannot do A, then all of her
options are morally ruled out. But information that an agent is
morally required to do something provides her with guidance among her
options by distinguishing between
options that are morally ruled out and options that are not morally
ruled
out.

Given the distinction between the two different kinds of possibilities,
the argument becomes:

Given an agent is morally required to do A in a particular situation,
then all other epistemic options she faces are morally ruled out.
If the agent cannot do A, then doing A is not among her metaphysical
options. Hence, if an agent is morally required to do A but
cannot do A, then all of her options are morally ruled out. But
information that an agent is morally required to do something provides
her with guidance among her options
by distinguishing between options that are morally ruled out and
options
that are not morally ruled out.

It is evident where the problems lie. The conclusion that if an
agent is morally required to do A but cannot do A, then all of her
options
are morally ruled out, infelicitously elides the distinction between
epistemic and metaphysical options. From the mere fact that an
agent lacks a certain
metaphysical option it does not follow that she lacks the corresponding
epistemic
option. So, from the mere fact that an agent in fact cannot do A,
it
does not follow that she knows that he cannot do A. Thus, all
that
follows from the moral requirement and the metaphysical fact is that
all
of the agent’s epistemic alternatives are ruled out, except A.
But there is nothing problematic about this; and now the moral
requirement can have its distinctive role in guiding deliberation and
action. Moral requirements insert themselves into the space of
epistemic possibilities, not directly into the space of metaphysical
possibilities.

I conclude that despite his noteworthy efforts, David Copp has not
successfully presented a compelling motivation for the Maxim. If
we reject the Maxim, we can reject PAP. And we are thus not
pushed toward a compatibilist account of freedom; as I explained above,
a compatibilist must say that we are free either to “change” the past
or the natural laws. That is, the compatibilist must deny that
our freedom is the freedom to extend the given past, holding the laws
of nature fixed. But this is quite implausible.

VI. Conclusion

Causal determinism threatens our intuitive and natural view of
ourselves as having free will in the sense that involves genuinely
available alternative possibilities. It threatens the common
sense view that the future is a garden of forking paths. For all
we know, causal determinism might turn out to be true. In this
paper I have explored the question of
what would be lost in a world without free will of this sort.
Would there still be a point to deliberation and practical
reasoning? Could there be moral responsibility and ethical
judgments?

The discovery that causal determinism is true would significantly alter
our picture of ourselves: in my view, giving up the view that the
future
is a garden of forking paths is a major change, with important
resonances
in the way we understand and couch our deliberation, moral
responsibility,
and ethical judgments. But I do not believe that we would need
entirely to jettison any of these aspects of our moral lives.
I believe that deliberation, moral responsibility, and judgments
of deontic morality are compatible with causal determinism and the lack
of free will (in the
sense involving alternative possibilities, understood as above).

Other philosophers are not so sanguine, and there is a bewildering
distribution of views on these issues. As we have seen,
Peter van Inwagen is a philosopher who believes that causal determinism
and the lack of free will would rule out both moral responsibility and
judgments of deontic morality, as well as rendering us inconsistent
every time we deliberate. Thus, van Inwagen and I represent, as
it were, “corner positions.” There are various “in-between”
views. Ishiyaque Haji contends that causal determinism and the
lack of alternative possibilities are completely compatible with robust
moral responsibility, but not judgments of deontic morality. In
contrast, Derk Pereboom is willing to concede that robust moral
responsibility (involving, say, reactive attitudes such as indignation
and resentment) does not require free will in the sense that involves
alternative possibilities, but he insists that causal determinism
indeed rules out such moral responsibility. Nevertheless, he
believes that causal determinism is compatible with judgments of
deontic morality. Similarly, Saul Smilansky holds that causal
determinism rules out robust moral responsibility, but
not the judgments of deontic morality. Both Pereboom and
Smilansky argue
that although causal determinism would rule out robust moral
responsibility, it still leaves room for something akin to moral
responsibility—something which is significant and valuable. It
also leaves room for various ethical judgments. So whereas Haji
thinks that the more significant threat from causal determinism is to
the judgments of deontic morality, Pereboom and Smilansky argue quite
the opposite. In contrast, both Van Inwagen and I view the
threats from causal determinism as equal in strength (although we come
to opposite conclusions).

A recurrent theme has been the difference between an agent’s epistemic
possibilities and metaphysical possibilities, given the truth of causal
determinism. This disparity is crucial to understanding practical
reasoning and deliberation in a causally deterministic world. It
is also an indispensable ingredient in the description of the
Frankfurt-type examples. Additionally, the non-identity of these
two sets of possibilities explains how moral requirements can play
their signature role of guiding action, even in a causally
deterministic world. On my view, the collapse of these two sets
into one—the set of metaphysical possibilities—would be a dramatic as
the collapse of the wave pocket in quantum mechanics. My view is
the opposite of the famous Biblical contention that the truth shall
make us free.
But this is really not surprising: if I genuinely knew all my future
choices
and behavior, then it would seem to me that I could just sit back and
let
the future unroll.

John Searle writes:

Suppose you go into a restaurant, and the waiter brings you the
menu. You have a choice between, let’s say, veal chops and
spaghetti; you cannot say: ‘Look, I am a determinist, che sara,
sara. I will just wait and see what I order! I will wait to
see what my beliefs and desires cause.’

Given the fact that the sets of metaphysical and epistemic
possibilities are not identical, no determinist need reason in the
indicated way. But if we collapse the sets into one, “che sara
sara” would not be inappropriate, or out of tune.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

This article is a somewhat
expanded version of one that is forthcoming in
David Copp's Handbook on
Ethical Theory (Oxford University
Press, 2004).
It had a lot of footntes, but technology has prevented their being
available
to us.